Bad Bunnies Burned as Biofuel in Sweden

When you look at adorable, fuzzy bunnies, do you think, “Gee, these suckers would make the perfect biofuel to keep me warm this winter!”? If so, you might want to go in for a psychiatric evaluation – or move to Sweden, where they’re actually doing just that.

Apparently, bunnies are such a huge nuisance in Stockholm parks, officials not only kill them by the thousands every year, but ship their bodies off to a biofuel facility so they can keep Swedes warm and cozy all winter long.

From Scientific American:

Converting the rabbits to fuel is the company Konvex, a subsidiary of the Danish company Daka Biodiesel, which makes automotive and heating fuels from vegetable and animal oils and fats. The Swedes have a variety of similar efforts, including turning slaughterhouse trimmings into biogas, a methane fuel that runs taxicabs in Linkoping in southern Sweden.

Bunnies, despite a felicity for breeding, are not quite abundant enough to be a reliable fuel so Stockholm also ships dead cats, cows, deer and horses to the plant for processing, Tuvunger told Der Spiegel. No word on whether the remains of man’s best friend are also keeping Swedes warm this winter.

Hey, don’t get us wrong. Using a waste material for fuel = WIN. However, there’s something messed up about killing cute, innocent little creatures by the thousands and then burning their bodies for warmth. It’s not like these are the killer rabbits of Monty Python.

And, perhaps these bunnies should not be a waste material in the first place – because there are better ways of dealing with an overpopulation problem than mass murder.

Link [Scientific American]

11 Bizarre Sources of Clean Energy, from Dead Turkeys to Urine

Why stick with boring old oil when you could be powering your home, car and gadgets with slaughterhouse waste, garbage and onions? As strange as transforming these substances into renewable fuels might seem, many of them are viable energy sources and some are already in use around the world.

And if you think these ideas are weird, check out MSNBC’s Crazy green energy ideas that just might work, which covers another 7 including solar panels in space and “snakes in a wave”.

Watermelons

Image via: Flickr user flattop341

The newest wild n’ crazy renewable energy on the scene is watermelon juice, which can be a valuable source of biofuel. Researchers say juice from ‘cull’ watermelons – imperfect ones that can’t be sold for consumption – can be efficiently fermented into ethanol. These ‘cull’ watermelons are currently just being plowed back into the field, so they’re technically a waste material.

Slaughterhouse Waste

Image via: Discover Magazine

As insanely disgusting as it sounds, turkey guts can be used to produce oil. No, really. It works in the same way that any fossil fuel is created, through pressure and heat, only at a faster pace.

A company called Changing World Technologies is transforming slaughterhouse waste – including a sickening blend of rotting heads, feet and intestines – into oil at a thermal conversion plant in Carthage, Missouri.  Other surprising items that go into the mix include old tires, mixed plastics and municipal sewage. But, the process still needs a lot of refinement to be commercially applicable.

The process of turning your Thanksgiving leftovers into oil is complicated, but not impossible. Mental Floss has an overview, which starts with chopping and churning those giblets into a fine, grainy mess. Mmm. Who’s hungry?

Poo (and Pee) Power

Image via: Statemaster

It may be distasteful, but waste – from both humans and animals – has proven to be a surprisingly efficient form of renewable energy. In Norway, city buses run on biomethane, which is a by-product of treated sewage. Not only is it a free source of energy, using biomethane in this way prevents it from being emitted into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Cows are also a major source of methane, emitting it in all sorts of unsavory ways, from both ends of their bodies. An Ohio company has developed a way to refine that methane gas in a way that could potentially power homes.

Then there are urine-powered batteries. That’s right, pee is a promising source of renewable energy as well thanks to its particular composition of its main component, urea, which is made up of hydrogen and nitrogen. Using a nickel-based electrode, scientists can create large amounts of cheap hydrogen from urine that can then be burned or used in fuel cells.

Garbage

Image via Idiocracy/20th Century Fox

There’s quite a bit of controversy as to whether trash is really a source of renewable energy – it’s certainly not ‘clean’. In fact, groups like Greenpeace warn that classifying garbage as a source of renewable energy risks ‘enshrining it’ rather than trying to produce less in the first place. Then, there’s the fact that trash incinerators are the leading source of extremely toxic chemicals called dioxins.

Modern incinerators use heat from the incineration to boil water, causing steam, which then generates electricity. These incinerators are cleaner than their predecessors, but they still pollute the air. Some argue that, with the looming threat of catastrophic climate change, using this energy is worth breathing in dirty air.

An Ottawa company called Plasco Energy Group is working on a method that transforms garbage into a synthetic gas without emitting greenhouse gases, but it’s got quite a few technological and financial hurdles to cross before it can be applied on a wide scale.

Onions

Image via: Flickr user Darwin Bell

One onion farmer is now crying all the way to the bank after finding a way to turn onion juice into fuel. This process has big up-front costs – about $9.5 million in this case – but they’ll make it back fairly quickly. Gills Onions saved a whopping $700,000 off their facility’s annual electric bill by using the juice to run his refrigerators and lighting, and another $400,000 on disposal costs. They also received $2.7 million from SoCal Gas, which offers financial incentives to customers that reduce natural gas consumption through on-site generation.

An anaerobic digester converts treated onion waste into biogas, which is then conditioned and turned into methane. The methane is pumped into a 600-kilowatt fuel cell to make electricity.
The same concept can be used for other waste products.

Viruses

Image via: MIT

Common viruses that are harmless to humans can be harnessed to create both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. Researchers at MIT genetically engineered viruses that build cathodes and anodes, producing batteries that have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries. The process of creating the batteries is environmentally friendly in and of itself, using non-toxic materials and requiring no harmful solvents.

Currently, the MIT prototype is about the size of a coin and can only be used 100 times, but researchers intend to pursue even better batteries using materials with higher voltage. Once that next generation of virus batteries is ready, they’ll be ready for commercial production.

Burning Bodies

Image via: Hubpages

There’s nothing like staying warm in the dead of winter thanks to the heat given off by burning corpses. The Swedish town of Halmstead figures that heat generated by crematoriums shouldn’t be wasted, so they decided to divert it into local buildings instead of just letting it escape into the sky.

Of course, they can’t just pump hot crematorium air directly into people’s houses. That air is chock full of nasty stuff like mercury from dental fillings, so the off-gases must be filtered before the heat is usable. But, this ‘byproduct energy’ saves costs, uses less water, and uses an available resource in an incredibly efficient and creative way.

Booze

Image via: Flickr user scottfeldstein

Sweden customs officials confiscate a million bottles of booze every year from purveyors of smuggled alcohol trying to evade local taxes. That’s a lot of alcohol – and until recently, it was all being poured down the drain. What a waste. Luckily, someone came up with a brilliant idea: shipping it to a waste-to-fuels plant where it’s added to bioreactors along with other waste, creating methane that is used to fuel biogas-powered vehicles.

Then there’s the Scottish distilleries that run their own plants on byproducts of the distilling process, along with sustainably harvested wood chips. Combination of Rothes Distillers Limited (CoRD) teamed up with Helius Energy to build a combined heat and power (CHP) plant along with a fertilizer factory fueled by all that booze waste. Makers Mark Distillery in Kentucky has been using a similar technique for a number of years.

Bugs that Poop Oil

Image via: Times Online

Bug excrement may seem like a most unlikely source of fuel, but scientists have actually found a way to genetically engineer bacteria that produce ‘renewable petroleum’. Silicon Valley company LS9 claims that this “Oil 2.0” will be carbon negative, as well. LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms about a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant, which have been modified to produce crude oil when fed agricultural waste.

It’s essentially the same process as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, it just sounds way crazier. The main challenge being faced by LS9 right now is that, although it can produce its bug fuel in lab beakers, meeting America’s weekly oil needs would require a facility roughly the size of Chicago.

Chocolate

Image via: FacilityBlog

Before you freak out at the idea of perfectly good, delicious chocolate being used as fuel instead of going into your mouth, relax: this source of renewable energy is made with cocoa bean shells, not the chocolate itself. Cocoa bean shells are a waste product that can be mixed with coal at power stations to produce sort-of-greener-ish fuel.

Cocoa bean shells will be donated to Public Service of New Hampshire when chocolate maker Lindt USA begins producing its own chocolate from raw cocoa beans by the end of 2009.

Unfortunately, though this sounds cool, adding cocoa shells to the coal doesn’t make a huge difference because of the tiny ratio of shells to coal.

Man-Made Tornadoes

Image via: Technovelgy

The average tornado contains as much energy as a typical power plant – but how in the world can you safely harvest that energy? Well, as it turns out, that requires creating man-made tornadoes in a controlled environment.

Canadian engineer Louis Michaud calls his tornado the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, and he says he could extract as much as 200 megawatts of electricity from it – enough to power a small city. Michaud heats an elevated layer of air so that the temperature is much higher than that of the air below, which creates a vortex, and then places wind turbines at the base of the vortex, which are able to suck up the energy contained within.

Michaud has built many small prototypes with nary a bump in the road, and producing a 200-megawatt facility would cost roughly $60 million, lower than the cost of any existing power source. He’s currently looking for investors.

Lower-Cost Solar Cells Can be Painted onto Rooftops

Nanoparticle ‘inks’ could soon be used to produce solar cells that can simply be sprayed onto a rooftop or other surfaces, and though this sounds like expensive technology, the chemical engineer who created it says it could reduce costs to one-tenth of their current price. Brian Korgel of the University of Texas at Austin says he believes that this reduction in price could thrust solar power into competition with fossil fuels.

From Science Daily:

For the past two years, Korgel and his team have been working on this low-cost, nanomaterials solution to photovoltaics – or solar cell – manufacturing. Korgel is collaborating with professors Al Bard and Paul Barbara, both of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Professor Ananth Dodabalapur of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. They recently showed proof-of-concept in a recent issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The inks could be printed on a roll-to-roll printing process on a plastic substrate or stainless steel. And the prospect of being able to paint the “inks” onto a rooftop or building is not far-fetched.

“You’d have to paint the light-absorbing material and a few other layers as well,” Korgel said. “This is one step in the direction towards paintable solar cells.”

Currently, Korgel and his team at Innovalight, a company he founded, have been able to develop solar-cell prototypes using copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) with efficiencies at one percent. If they can get to 10 percent, there’s great potential for commercialization.

That’s definitely promising considering the fact that America’s solar industry is lagging behind China’s due to the fact that we just can’t seem to compete with their prices. It will be interesting to see how far Korgel and his team can take this technology.

Link [Science Daily]

Solar ‘Sunflowers’ Provide Energy and Décor

Many people are put off by the less-than-impressive aesthetics of solar panels, maintaining that they take away from the visual impact of a home or business, while others insist that looks shouldn’t be a factor. But if more solar panels were like these flower-shaped ones by public art team Harries/Heder, nobody would have any cause to quibble.

15 of these ‘sunflowers’ sprouted up in Austin, Texas, on a pedestrian and bike path between the village of Mueller and highway I-35. From Inhabitat:

When construction on Mueller, a mixed-use urban village in Austin, Texas first began nearly a decade ago, developers set up a number of environmental and aesthetic rules to safeguard the green spaces and keep the town from taking on an industrial feel. So when a massive retail lot was proposed, Mueller agreed to let it be built on one condition: loading docks behind the stores had to be covered up. Enter Sunflowers, An Electric Garden — Austin’s largest public art installation.

The solar flowers collect sunlight during the day to power their own blue LEDs at night, turning them into an illuminated art display. Unused power is fed back into the grid.

Solar + art = smart! Design like this makes solar energy desirable to everyone.

Link [Inhabitat]

Oil About to Run Out, Leading Energy Expert Says

The age of oil is almost over, according to the chief economist at the well-respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. Dr. Fatih Birol warns of a catastrophic energy crunch that would bring any recovery from the current global economic crisis to a screeching halt.

The idea of ‘peak oil’ – the point at which the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached – has been around for a while, but much of the public has dismissed it as paranoia. Indeed, despite the fact that the global economy is absolutely dependent upon oil in order to function, most of the world’s leaders have not yet taken the possibility of a major oil shortage into consideration.

Dr. Birol says that oil is running out even faster than predicted, and believes that global production will peak in about 10 years. In most of the world’s oil fields, production has already peaked, and some experts believe we’re already in a rapidly accelerating decline.

From The Independent:

In a stark warning to Britain and the other Western powers, Dr Birol said that the market power of the very few oil-producing countries that hold substantial reserves of oil – mostly in the Middle East – would increase rapidly as the oil crisis begins to grip after 2010.

“One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day,” Dr Birol said. “The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously,” he said.

“The market power of the very few oil-producing countries, mainly in the Middle East, will increase very quickly. They already have about 40 per cent share of the oil market and this will increase much more strongly in the future,” he said.

There is now a real risk of a crunch in the oil supply after next year when demand picks up because not enough is being done to build up new supplies of oil to compensate for the rapid decline in existing fields.

There’s no longer any doubt at all that we need to move forward rapidly with clean, renewable energy before the global economy suffers a catastrophic setback. With alternatives in place, transitioning beyond dinosaur fuels will be a lot less painful.

Link [The Independent]
Photo credit: Flickr user azrainman

Radar Could Save Bats from Death by Wind Turbine

In the epic battle of conservationists vs. clean energy advocates, a compromise may have just been reached – at least, in terms of the protection of bats. Scientists have discovered that radar may help keep bats away from wind turbines. Researchers and conservationists have raised concerns in the past about wind turbines inadvertently killing the creatures.

From MSNBC:

For instance, in 2004, over the course of six weeks, roughly 1,764 and 2,900 bats were killed at two wind farms in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, respectively. The bats might not be killed by the wind turbine blades directly, but instead by the sudden drop in air pressure the swinging rotors induce, which in turn cause their lungs to over-expand and burst surrounding blood vessels.

A student at the University of Aberdeen first noticed that bats shied away from radar installations while driving past them. He was holding a bat detector out the window to scope out bat activity on the drive back home from out in the field. (Bat detectors are gadgets that scan for ultrasonic bat calls.)

You might think bats wouldn’t be affected by radar because they use sound waves to navigate in the dark, but researchers installed small portable marine radar units at 20 bat foraging sites inScotland and after monitoring bat presence, found that the radar reduced bat activity by 30 to 40 percent. The radar didn’t keep insects away, suggesting that the radar works as a deterrent, not by chasing away bats’ food.

Scientists hope that they’ll be able to design a radar system that would reduce bat activity near wind turbines by 80 to 90 percent. That would certainly be a big victory for both sides of the conservationists vs. clean energy battle.

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Exxon Makes $600M Investment in Algae Biofuels

For far too long, Exxon has lagged behind its peers when it comes to renewable energy and sustainability. Not that any oil company is even remotely green – but where others have at least taken baby steps, Exxon has willfully refused. Well, the company has finally made a move, beginning a $600 million partnership with biotech company Synthetic Genomics Inc. to develop transportation fuels from algae.

From The Huffington Post:

“This is not going to be easy, and there are no guarantees of success,” Emil Jacobs, a vice president at Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Co., said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But we’re combining Exxon Mobil’s technical and financial strength with a leader in bioscientific genomics.”

Jacobs said the project involves three critical steps: identifying algae strains that can produce suitable types of oil quickly and at low costs, determining the best way to grow the algae and developing systems to harvest enough for commercial purposes.

Besides the potential for large-scale production, algae has other benefits, Jacobs said. It can be grown using land and water unsuitable for other crop and food production; it consumes carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed for climate change; and it can produce an oil with molecular structures similar to the petroleum products _ gasoline, diesel, jet fuel _ Exxon already makes.

It’s about time Exxon started putting its money where its mouth is – sort of. The oil giant has spent years ‘fighting back’ against reports about its anti-green practices but hasn’t stepped up to the plate. No amount of PR can make up for inaction.

Exxon is still one of the world’s biggest oil companies, making billions in profits annually off environmentally destructive practices – and $600 million is a tiny amount compared to what the company spends to find new supplies of crude and gas. They’re still not green, and it’s highly unlikely that they ever will be.

Now the question is, how long before we’re bombarded with Exxon ads proclaiming their greenness for making this investment?

Link [Huffington Post]

America’s Top 25 Green Energy Leaders

Every quarter, the EPA publishes a list of America’s top users of green power, and some of the companies on the list may take you by surprise. These organizations generate their own renewable energy, buy it from suppliers or purchase offset credits to compensate for their traditional energy use.

While no one would bat an eye at Whole Foods clocking in at #5, many of the other high rankers are names you wouldn’t expect. In fact, two Texas cities rank at #10 and #11.

Here’s a snippet from Scientific American:

1. Intel
Santa Clara, CA | Information Technology
1,301 million green kWh, 46% of total power used
Buying the most renewable energy in the country is actually an honor Intel could do without, according to Will Swope, vice president of Intel’s corporate sustainability group. The company’s massive purchase is not just to stay ahead of the curve, he says, but “to give confidence to people who are creating sustainable energy.” Meaning that with increased green power supply, costs will go down for everyone—Intel included. The computer chipmaker buys the eco-sound electricity through offset credits, which pay for greener energy to enter the grid even though Intel can’t isolate it for use directly. The credits can be expensive, but Swope notes that shareholders have been behind the program. “Economics have shown,” he says, “that companies that maintain a more sustainable footprint have done better—even in economic meltdown—than those that don’t.”

2. PepsiCo
Purchase, NY | Food & Beverage
1,145 million green kWh, 100% of total power used
The conglomerate, which is separate from the Pepsi bottling groups, made a splash when its headquarters went all green with its power buys in early 2007. PepsiCo drinks in $39 billion in net revenues through brands from Aquafina to Quaker Oats; it has turned to renewable power brokers to purchase offset credits.

3. Kohl’s Department Stores
Menomonee Falls, WI | Retail
601 million green kWh, 50% of total power used
This chain is already the biggest solar electricity host in the U.S. To soak up rays on 60 (and counting) store and corporate rooftops, the retailer has partnered with Sun-
Edison, which owns and maintains the solar panels and sells the electricity to Kohl’s. The largest setup is the roof of a distribution center in San Bernardino, Calif., where 6,208 panels can crank out a full megawatt of power.

Check out the rest of the list at Scientific American.

Link [Scientific American]
Photo credit: aesrenew

Biofuel Fail: Jatropha Requires Huge Amounts of Water

The Jatropha shrub, which grows wild all over New Zealand, seemed like a really promising biofuel. It is grown on arid and marginal land in India, parts of Africa and other countries, and has been hailed as ‘green gold’. It was even used to power a commercial airliner in December. Unfortunately, despite its ability to grow wild in arid climates, it needs large amounts of water in order to produce adequate amounts of oil.

From Technology Review, via Yale E360:

Researchers from the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, report in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that jatropha requires five times as much water per unit of energy as sugarcane and corn, and nearly ten times as much as sugar beet–the most water-efficient biofuel crop, according to the same study.

In 2007, the oil-industry heavyweight BP teamed up with British biofuels company D1 Oils on a five-year, £80 million project to cultivate the plant in India, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. Together, the companies have planted more than 200,000 hectares so far. And the plant made headlines again late last year, when it became the first non-food-based biofuel to power a jet engine. But mounting evidence suggests that jatropha is not as ideal as once thought.

“The claim that jatropha doesn’t compete for water and land with food crops is complete nonsense,” says study coauthor Arjen Hoekstra. The researcher says it’s true that the plant can grow with little water and can survive through periods of drought, but to flourish, it needs good growing conditions just like any other plant. “If there isn’t sufficient water, you get a low amount of oil production,” Hoekstra says.

How disappointing. Jatropha seemed like a great solution to the controversy over biofuels displacing food crops, but it’s certainly not a sustainable source of energy if it requires that much water. Luckily, there are hundreds of researchers working on a wide array of potentially viable biofuels, so this discovery doesn’t set the industry back too much.

Link [Technology Review] via [Yale E360]
Photo credit: Flickr user kaffekrus

Clean Energy Economy Poised for Explosive Growth

Green jobs are hot and getting hotter, according to a new study by Pew Charitable Trusts. Green collar workers currently constitute a tiny but fast-growing sector of the U.S. economy, and that growth is going to explode in the coming months.

From The New York Times:

The “clean-energy economy” grew 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007 to 777,000 jobs. While that is just half a percent of all U.S. jobs, the clean-energy economy is poised to grow significantly with financial support from the public and private sectors, the Pew (pdf) concludes.

“The nation’s clean-energy economy is poised for explosive growth,” said Lori Grange, the Pew Center on the States’ interim deputy director. “The trends include surging venture capital investment … a critical growth rate in clean-energy generation, energy efficiency and environmentally friendly products.”

About 80 percent of venture capital investments in 2008 were in the clean energy and energy efficiency sector, broadly known as “cleantech.” And while cleantech slumped with overall venture capital in the first quarter of 2009, the sector outperformed telecommunications, media and other sectors, according to an analysis of Thompson Reuters data by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

The Pew report cites Obama’s $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as the driving force behind the clean energy economy.

Oregon has the nation’s strongest clean energy economy on a per-capita basis, but California, the nation’s most populous state, had the most clean energy jobs last year with about 125,000.

The report’s lead researcher even says that the numbers are on the conservative side. Growth may be even bigger.

Clean energy jobs FTW!

Link [The New York Times]

The Dirty Glory Days are Over: Signs of Peak ‘Cheap’ Coal

The United States can no longer claim to be “The Saudi Arabia of Coal”. That’s according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, which states that the days of cheap coal in America are nearly over. It’s a major blow to the coal industry, which has sought to defend itself against the advent of clean energy with the argument that coal is still a reliable long-term energy solution.

From the Wall Street Journal, via NRDC Switchboard:

No one says the U.S. is facing a coal shortage. But the emerging ranks of “peak coal” theorists argue that current production levels may be unsustainable and, if anything, create a false sense of security. David Rutledge, an electrical-engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who has studied global coal production, figures the U.S. has about half as much recoverable reserves as the government says, which would work out to about 120 years’ worth.

In the field, challenges are becoming more apparent. Mining companies report they have to dig deeper and move more earth to extract coal from aging mines, driving up costs. Utilities have grown skittish about whether suppliers can ship promised coal on time. American Electric Power Co., the nation’s biggest coal buyer, says it has stepped up its due diligence to make sure its suppliers can make deliveries after some firms missed shipments last fall. It even bought a mine to lock down supplies.

Of course, coal advocates claim that concerns about future supplies are overblown, but the Obama administration isn’t taking their word for it. The Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy, intends to create a new coal baseline from which it will begin its annual subtraction as soon as possible, according to a member of the energy analysis team.

Peak “cheap” coal doesn’t equal peak coal, and we certainly couldn’t count on peak coal happening before the planet gets to an irreversible stage of climate change. But if coal is going to get more expensive anyway, there goes the coal industry’s strongest argument for remaining the United States’ top source of energy indefinitely.

Link [The Wall Street Journal] via [NRDC Switchboard]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Money-Hungry Industries Fight to Expand Meaning of ‘Renewable Energy’

Motivated by dollar signs, industries are pushing to have a range of technologies categorized as renewable including nuclear power plants, the burning of garbage and even waste from coal plants. Everyone wants to get in on government incentives, which were designed to give technologies like wind and solar an economic boost.

From The New York Times:

The lure of the renewable label is understandable. Federal tax breaks for renewable energy have been reauthorized, and quotas for renewable energy production have been set in 28 states, accompanied by extensive new grants, loans and other economic advantages. And legislation is moving through both houses of Congress to establish national quotas for renewable energy sources, including the climate bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.

With billions of dollars at stake, legislators have been besieged by lobbyists eager to share in the wealth.

“They’ve been queuing up outside staff offices, everyone with all their ideas as to what should be included,” said Bill Wicker, the spokesman for the Democratic majority on the Senate energy committee, which is considering a national quota.

Next thing you know, the coal industry is going to go beyond attempts to convince us that coal is clean and find a way to claim that coal is renewable. Who else is going to come out of the woodwork in an attempt to grow their bank accounts?

Lobbyists. Oy.

In The Know: Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user david drexler

Green Gear Review: SuperBattery Hand-Crank Gadget Charger

You’re in the middle of nowhere, miles from a gas station, and your car breaks down. You pull out your cell phone to call AAA and – oh, great – it’s dead, too. What, exactly, do you do in this scenario? Well, if you’ve got a Datexx SupeBattery hand-crank gadget charger, you simply pull it out and start cranking. After a few minutes, you’ll have enough juice to power your cell long enough to make the call.

The SuperBattery can charge up to 1,200 different devices, including cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and handheld game consoles. Two minutes of cranking gives you six minutes of talk time on your phone or 50 minutes use of the built-in flashlight – just enough for emergency situations. It can also be used as a portable charger for camping trips and other situations in which a wall outlet is not available – just charge it up with the AC adapter before you leave and bring it with you.

I decided to test out the SuperBattery with my iPod, to see just how well it met these claims. I brought it with me on a long day hike and when my iPod power started getting low, I plugged it into the fully charged SuperBattery and got approximately 4 extra hours of play time.

Later, when the SuperBattery charge was up, I tested the hand-crank function, turning the crank for about two minutes. I hooked it up to my iPod and, indeed, got right about two minutes of listening time before the charge wore out.

The caveat: Datexx recommends always keeping your SuperBattery fully charged, which means constantly leaving it plugged in to an electrical socket when not in use, to prolong the battery’s life cycle. It does meet EnergyStar requirements and consumes very little electricity, but for people who are trying to cut back on the amount of gadgets plugged in around their homes, this might be a no-go.

However, the SuperBattery does successfully harness a source of renewable energy that we sometimes overlook: the power of our own strength. For an average cost of $35, the SuperBattery is definitely worth the cash to have a relatively green gadget charger on hand at all times.

Link [Datexx SuperBattery]

Weed Transforms Animal Poop into Fuel

A tiny flowering plant that thrives on animal waste could be the next big biofuel, say researchers at North Carolina State University. Duckweed, which is often seen in shallow ponds, transforms animal waste into a leafy starch that can then be turned into ethanol. Ultimately, using duckweed as fuel could kill two birds with one stone so to speak, because it could put all of that harmful animal waste from factory farms to good use.

From NC State, via Matter Network:

Their research shows that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to researcher Dr. Jay Cheng. This means that ethanol production using duckweed could be “faster and cheaper than from corn,” says fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp.

Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn, Cheng adds.

Large-scale hog farms manage their animal waste by storing it in large “lagoons” for biological treatment. Duckweed utilizes the nutrients in the wastewater for growth, thus capturing these nutrients and preventing their release into the environment. In other words, Cheng says, “Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol.”

Animal waste is a huge problem – it’s playing a big role in the dead zones that are blooming in oceans around the world, including the Jersey-sized one in the Gulf of Mexico. If duckweed could give us clean, renewable fuel while also addressing this issue, that would be huge. It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here.

Link [NC State] via [Matter Network]

Oil Companies Actually Getting Less Green

Most of the major oil companies have spent the last few years trying to convince us that they’re going green. BP, Exxon, Shell and others started running advertisements proclaiming that they were investing in renewable energy technology – hell, Exxon went so far as to leave a comment here on EarthFirst about the company’s supposed efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, claiming frustration at their bad reputation among environmentalists.

But, all of the greenwashed facades are coming crashing down. The world’s oil giants aren’t exactly lining up to follow President Obama’s green lead, and some of them are even breaking commitments they’ve already made.

From The New York Times:

Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus its alternative energy efforts on biofuels. The company had already sold much of its solar business and pulled out of a project last year to build the largest offshore wind farm, near London.

BP, a company that has spent nine years saying it was moving “beyond petroleum,” has been getting back to petroleum since 2007, paring back its renewable program. And American oil companies, which all along have been more skeptical of alternative energy than their European counterparts, are studiously ignoring the new messages coming from Washington.

“In my view, nothing has really changed,” Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said after the election of President Obama.

“We don’t oppose alternative energy sources and the development of those. But to hang the future of the country’s energy on those alternatives alone belies reality of their size and scale.”

The New York Times reports that Exxon is counting on oil, gas and coal to be just as prevalent in 2050 as they are today.  Perhaps that would be true if we were counting on oil giants alone to fund the renewable energy industry – but thankfully, we’re not. They’re dragging their feet for a reason. Hydrocarbons are a huge source of revenue for them and they’re not prepared to let go of them.

The fact is, the world is ready to start moving beyond fossil fuels. Oil companies need to shape up and get serious about renewable energy if they want to survive. It’s possible to adapt instead of keeping a death grip on the ways of the 20th century. Actually following through on their own green claims would be a start.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: London Rising Tide

Offshore Wind Power Could Replace Coal, says Salazar

Wind power has the ability to not just supplement but possibly entirely replace coal-fired power plants if it were fully developed off the East Coast, says Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.  Salazar spoke on Monday at a public hearing in Atlantic City on how America’s offshore areas can be used to meet our energy needs.

And who was the first to pipe up that this is impossible, but a coal industry group?

From Yahoo News:

“The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility,” he said. “It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.”

Salazar said ocean winds along the East Coast can generate 1 million megawatts of power, roughly the equivalent of 3,000 medium-sized coal-fired power plants, or nearly five times the number of coal plants now operating in the United States, according to the Energy Department.

Jason Hayes, a spokesman for the American Coal Council, said he was puzzled by Salazar’s projections. He said wind power plants face roadblocks including local opposition, concerns about their impact on wildlife, and problems in efficiently transmitting power from far offshore.

“It really is a stretch,” he said of Salazar’s estimate. “How you put that many new (wind) plants up, especially in deep water, is confusing. Even if you could do what he said, you still need to deal with the fact that the best wind plants generate power about 30 percent of the time. There’s got to be something to back that up.”

Salazar’s spokesperson clarified that the secretary does not expect wind power to be fully developed, but was speaking about its potential. Of course, it would take time – but the point is that it’s possible. And, given the environmental benefits, why shouldn’t we push wind power technology to its limits? Unless [shudder] a Republican wins the next election and we’re back to Bush-era policies within 5 years, the coal industry is already speaking from beyond the grave and they know it.

Link [Yahoo]

Photo credit: EarthFirst composite/Wikimedia Commons

MIT Creates Virus-Powered Car Battery

Could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that one day, viruses – the living kind, not the cyberspace kind – could power batteries? MIT researchers have announced that though it may sound like science fiction, it’s reality. They have successfully engineered viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery.

From Inhabitat:

These virus-built batteries can be created cheaply using an environmentally benign process, tout the same energy capacity as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries, and may one day be used to power everything from personal electronic devices to hybrid vehicles.

This isn’t the plot of the latest ‘B’ movie, although you would be forgiven for thinking so. The research team led by Angela Belcher, were able to create both a cathode and an anode. These are the key components in a battery that allow the movement of electrons across the electrolyte, thus generating power. Before you get worried about turbocharged super-bugs, rest assured that the viruses used will be common bacteriophages, which are harmless to humans (or so one hopes).

Their current prototype is the size of a coin and can only be used around 100 times, but this is MIT – they’ll smooth out the details in no time. They hope to eventually create a full-sized car battery.

We’ve seen some bizarre ideas lately in the field of renewable energy technology – from buses powered by human waste to turning airport travelers’ breath into fuel. How awesome is it to see people thinking outside the box like this? Such innovation really makes it feel like there’s an entire world of clean, green, renewable energy solutions just waiting for us to discover them.

Link [Inhabitat]

Military Spy Vehicles Powered by Alternative Energy

Even military spy vehicles are going green. Unmanned aerial vehicles, used by the military to scan the terrain for “possible threats and intelligence”, have long relied on fossil fuels to fly – but now, hydrogen-powered fuel cells are gaining popularity as an alternative. What it comes down to for the Office of Naval Research, which is sponsoring the ‘Ion Tiger’ program, is making them more efficient- and quieter.

From Science Daily:

In particular, the Ion Tiger UAV tests a hydrogen-powered fuel cell design, which can travel farther and carry heavier payloads than earlier battery-powered designs. Ion Tiger employs stealthy characteristics due to its small size, reduced noise, low heat signature and zero emissions.

“Pursuing energy efficiency and energy independence are core to ONR’s Power and Energy Focus Area,” said Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, Chief of Naval Research. “ONR’s investments in alternative energy sources, like fuel cell research, have application to the Navy and Marine Corps mission in future UAVs and vehicles. These investments also contribute directly to solving some of the same technology challenges faced at the national level.”

“In this size range, we are hopefully able to conduct very productive surveillance missions at low cost with a relatively small vehicle, and a high-quality electric payload,” says NRL Principal Investigator Dr. Karen Swider-Lyons.

It’s nice to know that the government is cutting back on emissions while training its all-seeing eye upon the land, eh? Now they can say it’s for our own security and that it’s green. It’s for our own good. It’s making us safe. One nation under CCTV… Big Brother is watching. Look busy!

Link [Science Daily]

Wind Powered Vehicle Breaks World Speed Record

You might not think a wind-powered vehicle could go very fast, but if so, Richard Jenkins’ ‘Greenbird’ just proved you wrong. The ‘Greenbird’ hit a staggering 126.1 miles per hour, breaking the world record and stunning onlookers at Ivenpah Lake in Nevada last weekend.

From Inhabitat:

The Greenbird is a carbon-fiber composite vehicle that is exclusively wind powered, making it essentially an earthbound sailboat. There were challenges involved, since at high speeds the vehicle tends to, well, take off. To counter this problem the vehicle incorporates specific design solutions, such as wings similar to those found in fomula one cars.

So now that he has achieved his first goal, what is next? Well, believe it or not, he will now try to break the record again – only this time, he will do so on ice.

So, how does it work? The Greenbird website explains:

The most basic principle of wind-powered vehicles is harnessing and optimising airflow. Just as airflow over an aircraft’s horizontal wing pushes the aircraft up, the flow of air over The Greenbird’s vertical sail pushes the vehicle forward.

The Greenbird utilises a combination of technology, usually found on aircraft and Formula One, to achieve staggering efficiency. Made from carbon composites, the vehicle takes huge forces at top speed, being able to transfer up to one ton of side force into the ground.

A phenomenon called ‘apparent wind’ allows the vehicle to travel faster than the wind. Learn more about it at the Greenbird website, and check out the video of the vehicle in action below.

Link [Inhabitat] + [Greenbird]

Next Page »